The Marquis de Sade and his publisher were both arrested by the Minister of Police in 1801 for writing and publishing Justine, and the "still more terrible work, Juliette," (Seaver et al, 1990). De Sade was not allowed a trial, but rather put directly in prison as an "administrative punishment" to spare the country a scandal. Before long, his detractors had him declared insane, and transferred to Charenton Asylum, where continued efforts were made to silence his pencils and subsequent influences on the outside world. He died at Charenton Asylum in 1814 of failed health.
The term sadism was adopted for professional use by Krafft-Ebing in 1898, classified as one of the sub-divisions of paraesthesia (a perversion of the sexual instinct)
http://www.popsubculture.com/pop/bio_project/marquis_de_sade.html
However, this century has seen the emergence of scholars and critics who have been willing to passionately dissect and defend the value of Sade’s work, perhaps making the Marquis one of history’s only true criminals to be exonerated and celebrated on legitimate intellectual and philosophical grounds. In a 1951 essay, "Must We Burn Sade," Simone de Beauvoir identifies Sade as a forerunner of Freud with an intuitive grasp of the nature of the human heart:
"It is remarkable, for example, that in 1795 Sade wrote: ‘Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.’ Not only does Sade, in the first part of this text, anticipate what has been called the ‘pansexuality’ of Freud, but also he makes eroticism the mainspring of human behavior. In addition, he asserts…that sexuality is charged with a significance that goes beyond it. Libido is everywhere, and it is always far more than itself. Sade certainly anticipated this great truth. He knew that the ‘perversions’ that are vulgarly regarded as moral monstrosities or physiological defects actually envelop what would now be called an intentionality. He understood, too, that our tastes are motivated not by the intrinsic qualities of the object but by the latter’s relationship with the subject. In a passage in La Nouvelle Justine he tries to explain coprophilia. His reply is faltering, but clumsily using the notion of imagination, he points out that the truth of a thing lies not in what it is but in the meaning it has taken on for us in the course of our individual experience. Intuitions such as these allow us to hail Sade as a precursor of psychoanalysis."
from http://www.crimelibrary.com/classics/marquis/7.htm
Another way the more adventurous reader might deal with Sade is to see him as the principal forerunner of modernism, a claim usually made for Nietzsche. He created a revolutionary and indeed sadistic new relationship between the reader and the author that forgoes the pleasure principle of traditional narrative and deals instead with insult, alienation and boredom. One of the most maddening and most modern -- if not postmodern -- aspects of Sade's writing is that he is programmed himself to foil most methods of decoding and typification. He never lets us know his true intent; there is no way of knowing whether he is writing on a level of subversive irony, whether he takes his wacky anarchist ideas seriously or whether they’re incited by his buffoonish exhibitionism. -- Francine du Plessix Gray in Salon.com